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Microsoft FAT Patent Rejected
dkh2 writes "It's being reported other places as well but, there's a very nice story over at Groklaw about efforts by the Public Patent Foundation (PubPat) to get Microsoft's patent on FAT restricted or revoked. Bearing in mind that Microsoft still has right of appeal, The USPTO has rejected Microsofts FAT patent." Our earlier story reported on efforts to overturn this patent.
A perfect example of how the system should work. The patent office doesn't need a reform, it needs to simply do a better job of following its own rules. Organizations like PubPat are a good thing, because they add another layer of checking (i.e. public responsibility) to the patent process.
It may surprise many to know that patent officers are often promoted on how many patents they reject, not how many they approve. Thus it is in their interest to reject any applications with even the slightest possibility of being invalid. Yet it seems that ridiculous patents make it through anyway. How does this happen?
The answer lies in the patent lawyers who draw up the papers. What they'll do, is that they'll draw up revision after revision of the idea until the patent office is confused enough to grant it. (Or perhaps they lucked upon a new patent officer.) That's why most of these patents seem so vague. The applicants are making sure that there's no way someone who doesn't have a very thorough education in the field of the patent could understand that the idea is unpatentable. Thus the idea passes through the process and must be challenged in court or via reexamination later.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Will they do the same with the thousand IBM useless patents?
In related news, the US Patent Office also rejected Bill Gates' patent applications for fire and the wheel. ~Knautilus
Guess MS's case was a little THIN. {Ahhh, I feel better now}
Seems to me a patent would have run out by now.
o ry
If you look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT_file_system#Hist
You'll see a couple landmarks:
FAT12 - 1980
FAT16 - 1983
VFAT - 1995
FAT32 - 1997
But really, the FAT file system is 24 years old at this point. How can you patent something you did 24 years ago and you've not complained about it in all that time?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Definitely *not* an example of how it should work. You have an external organisation doing the job that the patent office itself should be doing. That's a failure in need of reform. Perhaps if business processes and software were not patentable, the patent office might have more resources to devote to patents which are worthy of being granted.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
" As lawyer, this is ridiculous."
As a developer, this is wonderful.
Software patents are a bad idea. The only people who think differently are lawyers and developers who are mostly under 35 years of age.
All software is derivative.
More to the point, the greatest renassaince in software development came prior to patents of software. It is literally destroying the software industry. Oh, except for MS and IBM.
Really, get a clue.
...such as the following:
U.S. Patent #5,579,517 - Common name space for long and short filenames
U.S. Patent #5,745,902 - Method and system for accessing a file using file names having different file name formats
U.S. Patent #5,758,352 - Common name space for long and short filenames
U.S. Patent #6,286,013 - Method and system for providing a common name space for long and short file names in an operating system
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
On a warm summer's evenin' about a patent bound for approvals,
I called up the patent officers; they were too tired to speak.
They just took turns a starin' at the leagal techno babble
'til mind-numbing boredom overtook them, and errors began to creap.
One said, son, I've made a life out of readin' people's patents,
And knowin' what their prior arts were by the way they dotted their i's.
So if you don't mind my sayin', I can see you're really reachin.
For my sons university education, I'll give you some advice.
So I met and wrote his man a cheque, and he looked the zero's that followed.
Then he bummed a cigarette and asked me for a light.
And the night got deathly quiet, and his face lost all expression.
Said, if you're gonna play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right.
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to appeal 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to sue.
You never count your patents when you're sittin' at the judges table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the approval's done.
Now ev'ry patent leecher knows that the secret to survivin'
Is knowin' what to sell off and knowing what to keep.
'cause in ev'ry merger's a winner and ev'ry buyout a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to grab patents while people sleep.
So when he'd finished speakin', he turned back towards the window,
Crushed out his cigarette and faded off to sleep.
And somewhere in the darkness the patent officer, he got even.
But in his final words I found a crooked officer I could keep.
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to appeal 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to sue.
You never count your patents when you're sittin' at the judges table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the approval's done.
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to appeal 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to sue.
You never count your patents when you're sittin' at the judges table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the approval's done.
With nods to Kenny Rogers
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
FAT itself was never patented. This patent was covering Microsoft's scheme for packing long filenames into the old FAT system in such a way that a short filename (microso~1.txt et al) is persistently perserved for old DOS apps.
Microsoft felt that their innovation of a particular data structure (the same kind of elementary data structure that sophomore CS majors put together all the time) ought to be sufficient to allow them to control who gets to read and write from flash media, and etc., which adopted the format simply because that was the only thing that Windows could be relied upon to understand.
The loss of this patent strikes no blows against the freedom to innovate, believe me.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
[...] They are effectively ruling that Microsoft cannot hold a patent on software they created. [...]
The FAT filesystem itself is not "software", it is a specification. You only talk about "software" when you think of an implementation of FAT, like those found in Windows and the Linux kernel.
Score: i, Imaginary
Damnit!!! I was really hoping MS would get a patent on FAT, so I could tell my ass it was infringing and draft up a cease & desist .....
Groove Salad -- a nicely chilled plate of ambient grooves and beats.
Woa....they can reject patents? ;)
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
MSWords -- a patented approach for combining letters of the alphabet into meaningful units that can be "read" (for info on "reading", see MS patent 9997645, "A method for interpreting strings of alphabetic characters")
The patent was rejected based on prior art.
From the patent office rejection statement:
"...patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains."
Even for this case alone, these guys deserve our support.
Take away all of IBM's bogus patents and it will still hold one of the biggest patent portfolios on the planet. That cannot be said of Microsoft.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.